Curated by Clare Elliott

The work of Forrest Bess has recently reemerged in art-historical culture, contextualized with a narrative not dissimilar to that of Bess’s artistic idol, van Gogh: A painter (rich in homo sacer innuendo) rends open the aesthetic dialectic of corporeality and sensibility to clear room for an exceptional bioaesthetic art, resulting not only in radical acts of body modification and diagnoses of madness but also (for us) a ground plan for the reorganization of artistic possibility, both on canvas and off. Consolidating forty-eight of Bess’s paintings and an expanded version of Robert Gober’s celebrated curatorial project “The Man That Got Away,” from last year’s Whitney Biennial, this exhibition and catalogue are the next steps in spawning light from Bess’s refreshingly sacral body of work.

— Sam Pulitzer

Curated by Alison de Lima Greene, Carmen Giménez, Michael Govan, Christine Y. Kim, Nat Tro

With works ranging from small enclosures to volcano-size constructions, James Turrell has spent more than four decades crafting spaces in which to contemplate natural and artificial light. Beginning this April, three institutions in as many cities will work in concert to present a retrospective: The MFAH will gather a suite of the artist’s light projections and installations from 1967 to today; LACMA’s sprawling chapter will feature almost fifty drawings, photographs, models, and holograms; and in his first solo museum exhibition in New York since 1980, Turrell will transform the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a vast Skyspace. This tripartite exhibition will occasion two new publications and unveil many works for the first time, in a continent-spanning presentation befitting an artist who addresses spatial, architectural, and geographic context on scales both intimate and vast.

— James Merle Thomas